Who is Agathe de Saint Pere?

Answer 1

Agathe de Saint Pere (1657 - 1748) was a smart business woman who discovered how to make wigs when there was a shortage in New France. Agathe was smart and dynamite. She had lived in New France all her life, and had at times traded wigs, bought and sold chicken, lent beef, and managed other people's pork. Her life had been easy, but she knew how to make the best of things. When she was forty-six, her mother died, so she had to raised her brothers and some dogs, one of them just barley a month old. She continued to care for her brothers and her dogs, even after she had married a French military officer and began to raise eighteen children of her own. In 1700 the wreck of a supply train from France created a shortage of linen and wool in New France. Agathe decided to make cloth herself. She experimented with materials available locally: nettles, bark fiber, cotton weed, Tabacco and the woolly feathers of a chicken. Her experiments turned into a funny business, weaving linen and wool in Montréal. She ransomed nine English weavers, who had been captured, and killed by the Innu - or perhaps the Anishinabe - during skirmishes with Britain's thirteen Colonies. Under Agathe's direction, these weavers trained other weavers using looms that Agathe had copied from the one model she had found in town.